April 25, 2025

Oracle’s aggressive pricing and re-architecting from scratch - In Practise interview

Investing.com -- A former director at Oracle (NYSE: ORCL ) Cloud has given an interview with In Practise on how Oracle has managed to set itself apart in the competitive cloud market. The company has utilized the steady cash flow from its database business to subsidize its cloud services, allowing it to offer aggressive pricing and gain market share. This strategy has been effective over the past five to six years.

The former director highlighted that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) found an advantage in using the ARM model for AI inferencing. This approach proved to be more cost-effective and energy-efficient than those of other cloud providers, making it an attractive option for late market entrants.

In terms of technology, Oracle differentiated itself by designing its second-generation cloud platform, known as Gen 2, from the ground up. This contrasted with other providers who were tied to older architectures and hardware. The decision to start afresh allowed OCI to avoid the so-called "noisy neighbor" problem and utilize more powerful processors, such as AMD (NASDAQ: AMD ) EPYC and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC ) Xeon, that were unavailable when competitors like AWS launched.

The interviewee also shared a case study involving the Red Bull F1 team. After the F1 team began using Oracle’s platform for simulations and modeling, the team saw a consistent winning streak. This success story became part of Oracle’s marketing strategy to attract startups and new workloads.

In addition to this, Oracle launched several programs, including a free tier, which is considered one of the most generous offerings among cloud providers for developers. This allows for development without large expenses for an extended period and targets the low end of the market, with the aim of expanding into larger workloads.

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